Fun in Redmond & holiday cards

It's been pretty quiet on the bloggie front for the past couple of weeks as Carlos and I have been in Redmond visiting my parents for the holidays. We left DC on 15 December and we've already been in Redmond for about 2 weeks -- time really flies! I have been having a great time here and the weather has been OK (until today -- it is certainly snowing up a storm!). I even had time to visit my friend Molly in Seattle for a couple of days during my first weekend here! We had a great family Christmas at the house and even visited Judy and her family last night for a delicious meatloaf dinner!

Anyway, I had been doing a lot of art prior to arriving in Washington, but I wasn't able to blog about any of it until now because I was giving the gifts to people who read this blog! In this post I will talk about one of my craft projects -- my holiday cards for this year.

This year, I hand-carved a stamp of an agouti and stamped cream cardstock using a copper ink. Above the agouti I wrote "Have Agouti Holiday." I am pretty pleased with the cards and they were a lot of fun to make! I also made dark green envelopes and addressed everything with gold ink. I even had pretty evergreen-themed stamps for the cards that I mailed out to everybody!

I hope everyone received their holiday cards -- I had a lot of fun making them. What will I make for next year?

Recently: Raclette!

Things here have been way too busy recently. I have been pretty busy in the museum recently (starting a new contract with a botany lab and giving a seminar last Wednesday) and I have also been overall busy preparing/buying/making holiday/birthday gifts for everyone and getting ready to travel back to Washington (state) for the holidays.

Carlos comes back to DC Monday night (after being in the field for 1.5 months!) and we are leaving 2 days after that! I am really excited to go home and see my family and friends again -- I hope it doesn't snow there too much this year.

Anyway, I have plenty of crafty things to blog about, but that would spoil some holiday card/present surprises for people so I will have to refrain from posting until later (wah). In the meantime, I have recently discovered raclette cheese -- kind of like fondue but easier to deal with. I roasted some tiny yellow potatoes (awesome ones from Trader Joe's) in olive oil and sea salt then put some sliced raclette over the potatoes and cooked them a little longer -- it's a nice little dinner!

Thanksgiving weekend

It's taken me a while to download my pictures from last weekend when my friend Arietta and her cousin Kira visited for Thanksgiving. We had a really fun Thanksgiving dinner at the house of a friend in Virginia (about 20 people there!) and on the following days, we toured around DC!

On Friday, we went to the National Mall and visited the Natural History Museum (where I took Arietta behind the scenes to the National Herbarium and ant collections). Kira visited the Hirshorn museum and we all met up again for lunch at Teaism (I had a salmon bento box).

After lunch, we visited the National Gallery of Art (Kira gave us a nice tour -- she is an Art History major). We then wandered over to the East building of the National Gallery (more modern art) then took a really cool light-lined tunnel back to the main building then back out to the Mall.

Next we wandered over to the Capitol area to visit the Library of Congress -- I love that place.

After seeing a little of the Library, we walked back home, but stopped for tasty pizzas at 7th Hill along the way.

On Saturday, we started with a visit to Eastern Market (I bought some cool mittens here), then returned home to re-equip ourselves with warmer coats (it was in the 30's F today) before taking the metro to Dupont Circle for lunch at a Belgian cafe called Locolat.

I had never eaten here before, but I will have to bring Carlos here -- it was really good and fresh! We had dark hot chocolates and chocolate lattes to drink and all three of us had the same thing for lunch: a savory potato and chive waffle with grilled asparagus and parmesan shavings -- really tasty!

From lunch, we went back to the Mall and visited the Old Post Office tower for a nice view of the city.

Next, we traveled to Georgetown to stop at Trader Joe's to get a bunch of tasty things for dinner. We had a nice 'tapas' dinner for our last night: five or so different cheeses, baguette, crackers, bruschetta, apple, little yellow potatoes with melted raclette and riesling to drink.

It was such a fun Thanksgiving vacation with a couple of great friends!